At present, the domestic energy price is geared to the international standard. And due to the straining resources of international oil and gas, the price fluctuates frequently, leading to the frequent adjustment of gas rate. Therefore, it requires improvement of the gas meter. The purpose is to realize the functions of gas measuring, controlling, charging and management. However, domestically the gas meters can be divided into two categories based on the charge method: one is payment before use, such as IC card gas meter; the other is use before payment, such as the common diaphragm gas meter. Between the gas meters with two charge methods, the former is featured by the fact that once the gas fee is used up, the gas supply is stopped, and the user must buy the gas with IC card at designated stores and finish the relevant gas transmission procedures before the gas supply is resumed. However, artificial unreliable factors exist in the data exchange between the IC card and the gas meter. And the gas fee is out of real time control, such as gas fee adjustment by the gas supplier. For the latter, there are difficulties in data transcription, charging of gas fee, and inconvenience in use on the part of the gas user. The IC card gas meter adopts a charge method of gas volume (m3); the gas company sells the gas volume in advance; the user stores the purchased volume in the gas meter. The disadvantage of this method is that when the gas price is adjusted, the gas company can't adjust the price for the remaining volume of gas stored in the meter. Such hysteretic nature may lead to the hoarding of gas by the user, causing a loss to the gas company. And for the traditional diaphragm gas meter based on meter reading, unified price adjustment is also unavailable since a time period is inevitable in the meter reading by households.
In addition, the remote gas meters currently on market record the consumption base on volume. When the gas price is adjusted remotely, the remaining gas volume in the gas meter will change in volume, which will lead to the difference between the purchased volume and the volume of gas available for use. Such conflict in volume measuring mode will also induce disputes between the users and the gas company.
In addition, various remote reading gas meters, remote control gas meters are also appearing on the market. But gas meters of these structures all adopt a point-to-point transmission mode, meaning the gas meters transfers the data to the hand-reading device of the meter reader or the concentrator of the relevant resident district through wired or wireless way. Since the point-to-point transmission and the wireless signal are easily subject to disturbance of external frequencies and buildings, the reading effect is far from satisfactory. Therefore, none of the current gas meters can solve the technical problems of real time gas fee adjustment, feedback of gas meter data of the user, and centralized management, etc.